Author: Quentin

The Blackstone District hosted their (generally) annual festival fundraiser last month, and this year I drew the poster a little more organic than the 2015 version. Based on the Mitchell Block on the corner of 40th and Farnam Sts., the two-color screen-printed posters turned out pretty sharp, I think.

With the (very long) 2016 election season closing in the next 36 hours or so (we hope), and with a seemingly universal disdain for the process, we look back at a Hail Varsity project from the spring, in primary season. Each year the publication conducts an informal survey of Husker fans, and with stumping and polling and voting on everyone’s minds, we decided to present the data in a Nate-Silver-meets-ESPN-Magazine sort of way.

We produced campaign buttons for Huskers heroes of the past, largely based on the designs of historic pinbacks from the past century. Then we designed survey data with the same visual vocabulary you’d see on political sites.

While we encourage everyone to vote, it’s inadvisable to write-in Tommie Frazier (compelling though it may be).

We’ve teamed up with the awesome guys at Omaha Screen Co. to create a limited-run shirt. It’s printed with a design adapted from the 1941 Nebraska License plate. They’re available here in a range of colors and sizes, in both t-shirt and sweatshirts. The pre-sale runs through Oct. 23, so make sure to get your order in this week. Use the promo code “HanscomPark” to save a few bucks at checkout.

In Omaha’s most recent round of civic nearsightedness, the Public Works department intends to tear down the 111-year-old Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway Company streetcar barn at 26th and Lake Streets. For the past 60 years, Public Works has used the site as a base of operations and now it intends to tear down the building for surface parking. In addition to being an architecturally significant structure, it’s an anchor of a vibrant stretch of Lake Street in a neighborhood that has otherwise been wantonly neglected by city services for decades.

With interested buyers, there’s no sense in tearing down yet another community asset to clear land for yet another open lot in North Omaha. So, it’s time again to call city council members, Mayor Stothert and Mayoral Candidate Heath Mello (who, with any luck, will be elected next year and will help put an end to the Stothert demolition drive) to show your support for saving the complex.

As with the successful campaigns to save the Specht Building and Yates Elementary, I’ve created a logo for use in the effort. As always, it’s free to use in any way that advances the effort to preserve the building.

Here’s a full suite of logos in various formats, including vector: Logos.zip

Last week, Admiral District released a months-long photo project in the form of a book I was lucky enough to design. Photographer Brad Iwen spent much of the past year bringing about a dozen Omaha chefs into his studio to cook his or her favorite recipe and tell the story behind it. In addition to short documentaries on each dish and cook, he compiled the stories into a book and hosted a gallery opening of a bunch of his prints at his studio last week. Check out the documentaries and pick up a book over at MidwestFoodStories.com.

With three weeks left until the start of the college football season, it’s time again for the release of Hail Varsity’s annual schedule poster. This year I illustrated the facade of West Stadium. You can find your copied at select retailers around Lincoln and Omaha, but the best and easiest way to get your hands on one is to plunk down a buck here (seriously, ONE dollar). While you’re there, check out the other other sweet merchandise before the season starts.

Last week, the annual Hail Varsity football yearbook, previewing the 2016 season, hit newsstands. It’s the biggest one yet at 196 pages, features a two stunning gatefold covers and dozens of amazing portraits and photos of the team by ESPN Magazine staffer Bill Frakes and Montana photographer Paul Bellinger.

Designing it is always one of the highlights of the year.

As always, it’s chock-full of the insight and analysis of each Husker opponent readers have come to expect and breakdowns of every position, plus features on Tommy Armstrong Jr., Mike Riley‘s sophomore season, the geography of recruiting and the Husker receiving corps. It’s on newsstands now. But it’s cheaper, easier and better for everyone to just subscribe here.

I spent most of last winter gutting and remodeling the main bathroom in my 1890 Victorian home. It appeared to have been modestly redone in the early 1990s with linoleum flooring, a pressed-steel tub insert and small vanity. I wanted to take it back to the early days of indoor plumbing: hex tile floor, cast iron tub, subway tile walls, etc.

Getting it there involved removing half the drywall, and the entire floor, which revealed two surprises: a layer of asbestos tiles and a 10-square-foot area that was completely unsupported. The only thing holding up the previous bathtub was a 1/8-inch sheet of plywood.

After adding some joists and hiring a crew to remove the tainted tile, I was able to get the whole thing done in a little under four months.

The tub (with all its hardware) was a Craigslist find from a Bemis Park foursquare. Kay Dee custom milled the door and window casings to precisely match the rest of the house’s trim. Friends from Des Moines graciously gave me the console sink from their 1950s ranch after they updated their own bathroom.

I built the medicine cabinet around a mirror I found at an antique shop, and built the toiletries shelf out of brass fittings in a style matching the living room bookshelves I built last year. I rebuilt the transom based on one of the originals in the house.

The sconce came from Conner’s in Lincoln, and the 1913 stool is original to the house.

The light fixture with built-in exhaust fan is new, and before setting the floor tile, I installed radiant floor heating.

Last night was a victory party for saving the Christian Specht building. A few months ago, I posted the logos I designed for the campaign, but since then the project has grown a little.

Around the time the threat against the Specht was emerging, the amazing Yates School in the Gifford Park neighborhood was also being threatened, by Creighton University, one of the more aggressive predators of historic properties in Omaha. The effort to save the school didn’t have as much immediate momentum as the Specht, though. Looking back at the past five or six years, each time a historic building has been unduly threatened, there’s been a backlash against the threat. Most have been led by members of the neighborhood with an assist by Restoration Exchange Omaha. Since the efforts have often been more localized than the Specht campaign, they’ve ended up having desperate marketing campaigns, each with varying levels of success. Each of the responses to these demolitions — The Clarinda-Page, the Johnston Funeral Home, etc. — looked like their own local effort. One way to, I hope, increase the success rate of these preservation efforts is to make their visual identities part of a larger campaign. So, when I heard Yates was threaten shortly after I did the work on the Specht building, I broke out my pixel grid, my contrasting san-serif type and drew up a logo for the Save Yates group. They’ve taken the image and run with it and now hundreds of people around Gifford Park and the city have signs in their front yard showing their support, and it sounds like promising news may be coming out of that battle as well.

With a little luck, tying the visual identity of all of the threatened buildings in Omaha together will help us save more of them. The fact that the inaugural campaign to use this look was successful can’t hurt the cause, either.